- The global menopause wellness industry is predicted to be worth £491bn by 2025.
- You investigate companies that are cashing in on the dire menopause “trend.”
Are you a menopausal woman? Roll it up, roll it up, and move on over here. Because there's goodies! First up is a glamorous baseball cap (£20) with 'hormone' written on it, from Wiley, the menopausal supplement start-up backed by tennis champion Serena Williams. If it doesn't spark a conversation in the supermarket queue, it won't do you any good.
Next, use a nice moisturizer. No, it doesn't moisturize your face, it prevents it from drying out. It's called, erm, Vag of Honor, costs £41, and is actress Naomi Watts' best-seller at Stripes, her “holistic menopause solution that works.”
Lastly, may I show you around Gwyneth Paltrow's online wellbeing emporium, Goop? There are plenty of medications, lotions, and “sexual wellness routines” (don't ask) out there that can help with menopausal symptoms. This includes an herbal supplement called “Wait a minute” Madame Overly. , just £71 for a month's supply. We would appreciate it if you had a credit card ready.
Has the market for menopausal products reached saturation? It certainly feels like that. Everywhere you go, there are products designed to help women deal with hot flashes, night sweats, dry skin, brain fog, joint pain, anxiety, and more. Many of them are enthusiastically endorsed by celebrities.
Loss of sex drive in midlife has proven advantageous, especially for male marketers, and we're now seeing sex toys repackaged as essential self-care accessories . fifty shades of gray Mode co-creative director and star Dakota Johnson, who specializes in stylish vibrators, even declared “sexual health is a fundamental human right” at the brand's 2020 launch. Strangely, it was not found in the United Nations' official list, which focuses on more boring things such as the right to life and liberty.
But sexual wellness is undoubtedly big business, worth £46.6bn in 2021, and the industry is predicted to reach £70.5bn by 2028, according to research firm Insight Partners. Meanwhile, the Global Wellness Summit predicts that the value of the entire menopause industry will be a whopping £491 billion by 2025.
We want attention, but in return we are patronized and scammed out of money.
Primark now sells pajamas made from temperature-regulating and moisture-wicking fabric to combat night sweats. Late last year, Twinings launched Menopause Cool His Moments teabags, a super blend of peach, sage, lemon balm, honeybush (no, I'm neither) and vitamin B6, making even the humble tea Meno. It has undergone a major transformation. At £3.49 for 20 teabags, it's 70p more expensive than Twinings' regular fruit tea.
“I don't want to say Twining's Tea is the nadir of menopause marketing,” sighs the book's creator, Sam Baker. The Sift, books and podcasts aimed at women over 40.
Ten years ago, when Baker started experiencing menopause, “you just said that word out loud and everyone started distancing themselves from you, like it was contagious.”
How things change.Baker's book, subtitled When How did I (get lost) find myself after turning 40?published in 2020, opens up new and much-needed conversations about and among the vast range of women experiencing this stage of life who have previously felt ignored. It helped me get started.
By 2021, that voice had grown louder, and Davina McCall's Channel 4 documentary was aired that year. Sex, myths, and menopause It attracted an audience of more than 2 million people and pushed midlife women's health firmly into the mainstream.
I can't count the number of times I've had a frank discussion about menopause symptoms recently with casual acquaintances at parties, work, the gym, etc. Brain fog is most common and usually occurs in situations where someone loses the thread of a conversation.
Similarly, I have interviewed many female celebrities in this age group. A few years ago, they would have been just as likely to bring up menopause as to credit their youthful appearance to Botox rather than drinking lots of water and getting enough sleep. Now, it's often impossible to stop them from lashing out about it.
All of this may seem puzzling to older women who wouldn't dream of embarrassingly discussing something called “change” at a dinner party, but for someone of my generation (near menopause), New approaches are seen as progress. After all, when it comes to breaking taboos, talking is better.
How strange it seems now that until recently there was an event that 50% of people experience.
However, whenever society changes, business opportunities arise, and market players are aiming to take advantage of them. What was once a welcome conversation now feels like a never-ending conversation. Menopause is like a drunken party that corners you in the host's kitchen at 2 a.m. while you nod politely and hope a cab arrives soon.
Of course, women need solutions for menopause. Not everyone can or wants to take her HRT. Some of these products clearly work for some people. But only if you have the cash to flush.
And don't forget that some of the aforementioned problems may be best tackled through changes in society's overall structure and mindset rather than tea bags.
For example, more empathy and flexibility in the workplace for women struggling with menopause could be helpful, as is often the case with juggling exhausting caregiving responsibilities for both younger and older members of the family. It would be helpful.
“The aim was to make menopause part of everyday conversation and accepted as just another life stage for half the population,” Baker says. “But instead of being truly embraced and destigmatized, it has turned into just a shopping opportunity.”
In particular, grating is called “menoarai''. When is a facial spritz not a facial spritz? Of course, if you're menopausal, use a cooling facial spritz. Serena Williams, who founded a venture capital fund to invest in women-led startups in 2017, called menopause a “trend,” while Paltrow spoke of her plans to “rebrand” it.
It's easy to laugh at the latter, and many people do, but since Goop is now worth $250 million, she's laughing out loud all the way to the bank.
“We want to be heard, we want to be heard, we want to be seen. In return, we get patronized, shafted, and extorted from money,” Baker says. But we continue to achieve this. Quite literally, Waitrose reports that sales of what it quaintly calls “women's health tea” have increased by nearly 50% in the past year.
The supermarket also sees a surge in online searches for 'healthy menopause diets', so menopause-friendly microwaveable ready-to-cook meals arrive and you can lounge on the sofa in Primark Meno pajamas He also said that it feels like it's only a matter of time.
Paltrow doesn't seem too keen on the subject.
Illustration: Art Belikov
